Rating: 
Summary: "You always belong where you're from"
Review: Tawni O'Dell's lyrical, ambitious and tension-filled novel seems to emerge and explode onto the page. The story is rendered in such a tightly disciplined prose that the reader will probably be left overwhelmed by the strength of the author's vision. Ivan Zoschenko "the Great Ivan Z" is an aging, former football hero and drifter who has lost his father in a mine explosion that shattered the town of Coal Run thirty years ago. Now living in Florida he is sent a newspaper article telling him that an old teammate, Reese Rayner is about to be released from prison after fifteen years for murder and is heading back to the town. Reese had violently and brutally mutilated his wife, who was so badly battered that she remains hooked up to life support in a convalescent home run by Ivan's compassionate and kindly mother. Ivan returns to Coal Run a weather-beaten man intent on revenge - a man who remains bitter, angry, and with a penchant for wayward drinking. He scrapes out a living working as a local deputy, and sleeps either in his truck or on the sofa at his sister, Jolene's house. The story takes place over one week, from Sunday to Friday, as Ivan, conflicted with pent-up and astringent fury, begins to settle old scores, face the mistakes he made in his careless youth, and reconnect with the people he's either treated badly or ignored. Packed into this bitterly powerful novel, is a dazzling array of well-chiseled, colorful characters: Ivan's former teenage idol Val Claypool, hangs around the town, and reminisces with a sense of palpable regret his time in the Vietnam War, where he lost his friends and his leg. The climate of mutual need is blended with a deep-seated contempt in the Raynor family, where Jeff Rayner, unemployed, desperate, and unable to provide for his wife, Bobbie and their children, is driven to the brink of fury and despair. The spent anger, the family dysfunction, the desperation, and the sense of disappointed lives going nowhere permeate this hard-edged story. Coal Run is not just a searing portrait of one man's chronicle of personal tragedy, but also a bitterly acute commentary on one community's disaffected and disparate inhabitants. The book is strongest when it sticks to the poetic descriptions of and the destruction and the sense of hopelessness of Coal Run and the surrounding areas. The explosion in "Gertie," the local mine, left a town visibly on fire, and an entire community gone: houses raised, buckled sidewalks and driveways leading to nowhere and nothing, lawn ornaments and bicycles left behind in weed-choked yards. The coal that had once provided the town with life has turned to poison beneath it and caused its death. Questions of regret, disappointment, love, loss and the fragility of human life are woven together as Ivan tries to understand how he can dislike a town he still loves, how he can envy a way of life he doesn't necessarily want to have, and how he needed to leave his home in order to realize that it actually is his home. Coal Run is richly and tautly rendered, and O'Dell has the shear narrative skill to present a story that is both complex and multi-layered. Her prose is meticulously whittled and surefooted and her powers of description are exacting and uncompromising - for one terrible instant Ivan feels he's been manipulated and pitted against the town for reasons he just doesn't understand and by forces beyond his control. Coal Run is narrated in a generous, patient, and intelligent voice, and the author almost presents the subject matter from the perspective of an insider, clear eyed and without sentimentality. This is a fine novel, about a man and a community who feels they have lost everything, and consequently, stands empty handed. Redemption and deliverance do come to Ivan and the townspeople of Coal Run, but only after much soul-searching, hurting, and pain. Mike Leonard June 04
Rating: 
Summary: Pleasing second story of rural western Pennsylvania
Review: The other five-star reviews have this book pegged. It is a terrific, consuming, colorful, rich read. I picked it up and read it in less than 24 hours, just two days after finishing O'Dell's first novel, "Back Roads" in the same, short span. Well done!
Compared to her wonderful first effort, "Coal Run" surfaces even more details about the struggle for life in the economic ruins of former coal country. There is more humor, love, and hope than in her much darker, first novel. My initial impression of her leading male character, based on "Back Roads" and now in "Coal Run" is that she can really slip into the skin of a young male protagonist. Again, that DeMille-like sense of disturbed humor, focusing on alcohol, sex and their myriad interactions, spills across the pages. You laugh along with the crippled former All-American as he works through the week where his nemisis is realeased from prison and cry at the memories of coal mine explosions, fire and death.
My personal preference -- perhaps an easier, happier, simpler way out, but I'm a reader, not an author -- would have been for some more closure. I had another person in mind to receive the prized two hundrd acres from Flo's will. And I had another person in mind to be carried out of the house under the sheet in the last chapter. And while Ivan does find a form of closure with one deep, personal part of his life, I finished the book wondering about what would become of the young doctor, the surprisingly heroic lawyer, and the resurrected football star. Maybe there is a sequel in this. I sure hope so, and not in five years. I hope the author's personal problems are behind her. Check tawniodell.com.
Rating:
Summary: Such a twist it will knock your socks off!
Review: WOW! I had troubles getting into the story at the beginning but then the last 100 pages I couldn't put this book down! This is a book to add to your collection and I WILL be getting other books by this talented amazing author!
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